It doesn’t come from aliens either. No, that 28% of web traffic comes from bots and other “nonhuman signals,” according to a study from Adobe (via the Wall Street Journal). Click farms are also to blame, and while bots are easy to understand, where are the other “nonhuman signals” coming from? Increasingly, virtual assistants, according to Dave Weinstein, director of engineering for Adobe Experience Cloud:

“We realized that with the growth of things like Alexa and Google Home and other assistants, increasingly more and more traffic is going to be automated in nature. In the long term, real humans at real browsers will be a diminishing portion of traffic.”

All this spells trouble of course for marketers and advertisers as traffic from nonhuman sources means almost 30% of their ad efforts are going to things that will never buy their products.